2009 House Key Votes

111th Congress

How Scoring Works

FreeedomWorks identifies the most important votes on issues of economic freedom and scores Members of Congress based on their votes. We use a scale of 100, so the higher the score the more often the Member is on our side fighting for lower taxes, less government and more freedom.

Special Votes

Possible vote augmentations include:

Vote is weighted as double the score of a typical vote when figuring a legislator's overall score.

Vote is weighted as triple the score of a typical vote when figuring a legislator's overall score.

Vote is disregarded when figuring a legislator's overall score.

Legislators not Scored

The following legislators were not scored for this year because FreedomWorks has determined that they missed too many votes to receive a fair and accurate score.

Judy M. Chu

Rep. Chu has not been scored for 2009 because she was elected in a special election in July.

John Garamendi

Rep. Garamendi has not been scored for 2009 because he was elected in a special election in November.

Kirsten E. Gillibrand

Rep. Gillibrand has not been scored for 2009 because she was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January.

John M. McHugh

Rep. McHugh has not been scored for 20009 because he was appointed Secretary of the Army in September.

Scott Murphy

Rep. Scott Murphy has not been scored for 2009 because he was elected in a special election in April.

William L. Owens

Rep. Owens has not been scored in 2009 because he was elected in a special election in November.

Nancy Pelosi

Speaker of the House Pelosi has not been scored in 2009 because the Speaker rarely votes under House procedure.

Mike Quigley

Rep. Quigley has not been scored for 2009 because he was elected in a special election in April.

Hilda L. Solis

Rep. Solis has not been scored for 2009 because she was appointed as Secretary of Labor in February.

Ellen O. Tauscher

Rep. Tauscher has not been scored for 2009 because she was appointed Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Intermational Security in June.

Key Vote Descriptions

Key Vote 1: H.R. 12 - Paycheck Fairness Act

The Paycheck Fairness Act would enforce more strictly the wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in order to address a perceived wage "gender gap". Instead, its provisions are an invitation to increase lawsuits with no end in sight for compensation. We should not be heaping more financial burdens on our business institutions and taking away the power of employers to make sound personnel decisions - all because of a misunderstood statistic.

"Nay" votes scored.

Key Vote 2: H.R. 11 - Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

This bill would amend Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to permit discrimination claims against employers well outside of the current statute of 180 days. This presents a radical departure from current anti-discrimination laws. Doing away with any practical statute of limitations, which has been considered a just practice in courts for centuries, opens the flood gates to a river of frivolous lawsuits.

The $700 billion in Wall Street bailout funds authorized by TARP was a bad policy in its own right, and the actual use of those funds has been even more troubling. The "TARP Reform and Accountability Act" fails to adequately protect these taxpayer funds or safeguard how they are being used. This motion to recommit would have stopped the unused $350 billion in TARP funding from being spent at all, and would have forced the Treasury Department to submit a repayment plan for those bailout funds which have already been spent.

This legislation calls for spending an additional $33 billion over the next five years to expand coverage under the S-CHIP program. At a time when our nation is facing record-breaking deficits in the trillions of dollars, expanding autopilot spending programs should not be on the agenda.

This bill would create $787 billion in new government spending on projects designed to stimulate an economic recovery. It is neither the government's role, nor is it within its ability, to spend the economy into prosperity. This stimulus package merely spends a fortune in taxpayers' hard-earned money to give away to whatever special interests are best able to claim that they can "create jobs".

"Nay" votes scored.

Key Vote 6: H.R. 1105 - Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

This bill to fund the federal government contains a whopping 80 percent spending increase and is packed with earmarks and sweeping policy changes. Altogether, this omnibus bill increases government spending at more than double the rate of inflation and almost triple the rate of median growth in household incomes. With budget deficits already running at record highs, this bill just accelerates Washington's already out-of-control spending.

"Nay" votes scored.

Key Vote 7: H.R. 1106 - Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009

This legislation allows bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages - including reducing principal - rather than leaving those business decisions in the hands of the banks and lenders who own the homes. The act modifies the Hope for Homeowners program by removing the taxpayer protections in place, making it easier for those who took mortgages they could not afford to receive a taxpayer-funded bailout.

This amendment sought to remove all Davis-Bacon prevailing wage provisions from the 2009 water resources bill. Davis-Bacon is a leftover from the New Deal era which costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year because it requires government contractors to pay "local prevailing wages" for every project, which really means letting expensive union labor receive the contracts regardless of other competition.

Their budget taxes too much, spends too much, and borrows too much. And, potentially worst of all, it would open the door for socialized medicine and a massive energy tax to be enacted later this year without substantial debate through the reconciliation process.

"Nay" votes scored.

Key Vote 10: H.R. 2346 - Supplemental Appropriations, FY 2009

The bill includes a $100 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. The bill contains funding for other projects that should not be used as a vehicle to ram IMF funding through Congress. Using this method to get the IMF funding passed is dirty Washington politics and law makers should reject it.

This legislation marks a radical increase in power for the Food and Drug Administration over the tobacco industry, and another attempt by a parental government to make citizens' health choices for them.

The bill includes a $100 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. The bill contains funding for other projects that should not be used as a vehicle to ram IMF funding through Congress. Using this method to get the IMF funding passed is dirty Washington politics and law makers should reject it.

The Waxman-Markey energy bill calls for a “cap-and-trade” system for the regulation of greenhouse gases, and is, in essence, a massive tax on all energy use. The resulting spike in energy costs would devastate the economy across the board, and would particularly harm lower-income individuals, who would have even less money to spend on steadily rising electric and heating bills.

This bill introduces federal control of employee compensation to a degree that is both constitutionally questionable and has no place in a market economy. Perhaps most startling about this bill is that the new mandates it establishes on the private sector are so broad and ill-defined that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is unable to determine just how much these rules will cost the economy, making it impossible to conduct a cost-benefit analysis.

The bill would essentially provide an endless line of credit to college students, as well as greatly increasing the amount given out through Pell Grants. Guaranteeing students access to free, easy loans on grants will encourage them to take on more debt that they cannot afford, while colleges will continue to raise their tuition to match the flow of government money. This bill further expands the massive student loan debt bubble, which - like the housing bubble before it - will eventually burst.

"Nay" votes scored.

Key Vote 16: H.R. 3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act

(Note: this was the original version of ObamaCare, later passed as H.R. 3590.) This comprehensive government takeover of health care saddles hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes upon the American people. The bill contains an unconstitutional individual mandate forcing people to buy health insurance simply because they exist. Instead of making health care more affordable, this bill's mandates and regulations will massively increase the cost of everyone's health insurance and reduce the quality of care over time.

This bill contains the "doc fix" that Congress passes annually in order to keep Medicare payments to doctors from sharply decreasing. While the doc fix may be necessary in order to keep doctors from opting out of seeing Medicare patients, this bill would cost $200 billion over ten years, with no spending reforms to offset its huge expense. Separating this bill from the main comprehensive health care reform bill is thus a fundamentally dishonest attempt to hide the true costs of the massive health care takeover being discussed in Congress, and to kick the problem of Medicare reform down the road yet again.

While this bill claims to enact "permanent estate tax relief", the legislation puts in place a permanent 45 percent tax on estates over $3.5 million. A 45 percent tax is a dramatic tax increase over the zero percent death tax that will be in place in 2010, when death is scheduled to no longer be a taxable event.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, or so-called “minibus” would combine six of the seven remaining appropriations bills to fund nine Cabinet departments to the tune of $447 billion and $600 billion in funding for Medicare and Medicaid for a total of $1.1 trillion; a 13% increase over FY 2009 and a 25% increase over FY 2008.

This motion to recommit would have amended the Dodd-Frank bill to fully repeal the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and to reduce the national debt limit by an amount corresponding to the hundreds of billions that would be saved by TARP's repeal.

The "Dodd-Frank" bill not only fails in its stated goal of reining in the risky lending that led to the current fiscal crisis, it actually institutionalizes the practice of bailing out banks deemed to be "too big to fail". By telling Wall Street banks that irresponsible lending will be rewarded by government bailouts, this bill almost guarantees another financial bubble and collapse in the future.